But chemistry can be a tricky thing. Add a cocktail or two or hurt feelings, and it can blow up in your face. I never wanted to take that chance, so I rarely socialized with Matt outside of work. We didn’t tell each other our secrets, our fears, our business. It was more like the intense intimacy of being in a Broadway play together: after the curtain call, actors often go their separate ways, back to their lives, and so did we.
On top of that, Matt was just a very discreet guy, never putting his personal stuff out there. When he broke off his engagement to a local newscaster, I had to hear it from someone else. And I didn’t really tell him the details of Jay’s cancer treatment. We weren’t close in that way.
Often, when the girls and I were on vacation, strangers would approach and ask, “Where in the world is Matt Lauer?”—a reference to his globe-trotting series. But I also got the sense they were actually wondering why he wasn’t with us, as if he were a fourth member of our family. I’d laugh and explain, “We work together—we don’t vacation together!”
You could hardly blame anyone for thinking otherwise. The TODAY show marketing machine, always in overdrive, heavily promoted the idea that we were super-tight; look no further than those goofy promos extolling America’s First Family, with “Katie, Matt, Al, and Ann, first on your TV.” We often rolled our eyes at those, joking, “Yeah, we’re a family, all right—the Manson family.” But Matt and I both knew our success was built on the perception that we were like brother and sister, and between the hours of 7:00 and 9:00 a.m., we were.
I’D HEARD THE whispers about Matt. And there were a couple of incidents that kept the office rumor mill churning. One involved an interview he did with Kitty Kelley, the queen of tell-all biographies, who’d just gone to town on the Bush family. A huge admirer of the Bushes, Matt was unusually combative. Afterward, a producer wrote him a “top line,” a communication system within NBC, congratulating him on the interview. Rather than thanking her, Matt asked if she was trying to butter him up. The producer wrote back saying that wasn’t her style; she wouldn’t know how. Matt said he’d show her, suggesting she spread it on her thighs, invited her to his studio office, and asked her to wear that skirt that came off so easily （or something to that effect）。 The producer stared at her computer—then realized the message wasn’t for her.
Minutes later, a flustered Matt appeared at her door. He handed her a book. “This might be good for the show,” he said. They never spoke about the incident.
The producer called me and told me what happened. “Can you believe it?”
Then it hit us: The scuttlebutt was that Matt had a fling at the Olympics with a production assistant. She and the producer had the same last name.
My first reaction was Wow, gross, he’s cheating on his wife. Not That’s not okay, he’s taking advantage of a young woman on the show.
The general rule at the time was It’s none of your business. A don’t-ask-don’t-tell culture where anything goes, and apparently everything did. Assuming Matt was having a consensual fling, I didn’t even consider talking to the young employee about it and embarrassing her. I just figured that’s how she’d feel—embarrassed. I never got the chance to find out.
Another story that made the rounds: Matt’s wife, Annette, calling the control room one Saturday morning, furiously looking for him, demanding the home number of an anchor he’d been linked with. When I heard about it, I felt humiliated for Annette. But I had no idea if the rumors were true and, if they were, what I would even do with that information.
Welcome to TV news pre-MeToo. Salacious tales about who was shagging whom were practically part of the news cycle. Most of the speculation centered around the men in charge: An ongoing affair between a high-ranking, married executive and a junior publicist. A tryst between a powerful producer and his assistant, who quickly jumped several rungs up the ladder. Open secrets about an anchor and his long-term mistress, giving his assistant the unenviable task of juggling his schedule and keeping his wife in the dark. The lurid tale of a director engaging in a night of wild sex with a young staffer in a hotel bathroom at the Sydney Olympics. Years later, I’d learn about a secret office they called “the Bunker”—where the only one with a key was a male anchor who used it for one-on-ones, and I don’t mean interviews.
Then there was HR. Called Personnel back then, it was nothing like the zero-tolerance ethics bastions they’d strive to become, churning out sensitivity-training courses and surveys （with decidedly mixed results）。 If there was a three-ring binder stuffed in a dusty file cabinet containing some pro forma policy regarding the rules of engagement, no one bothered to share it with the employees. A former NBC colleague recently told me that at one point, even the head of HR was screwing a low-level producer.